Our Mission is to rewrite the model of what's possible to drive life forward

Technology and biology are coming together to amplify each other in profound ways.

We work on the ground level to galvanize the industry around this fast-growing field and form long-term partnerships with entrepreneurs inventing the future.

We are not just capital allocators, but company builders, scientists, and engineers.

Our philosophy is informed by our experience founding, building, and investing in successful biotech, hardware, and software platforms. We seek to mirror the founders who will define the next generation of the life sciences with native fluency across the continuum of chemistry, biology, software, machine learning, and automation.

Our approach is purpose-built for the sector.

Investing across platforms, software, and tools

Flexibility to invest across stages

Founder-centric partnership model

Fundamental research in science, technology, and markets

Long-term oriented to unlock compounding value of platforms

Global reach

Our team

Adam Goulburn, PhD

Founder & Managing Partner

Adam invests at the intersection of biology, healthcare, technology and data. He is interested in the digitization of healthcare; genomics and coding biology; the microbiome; neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces; next-gen bio-imaging; regenerative medicine; and other areas of applied hard sciences.

Adam was most recently a General Partner at Lux Capital where he founded and incubated a number of companies including Cajal Neuroscience, VNV Bio and Kallyope where he was the founding CEO. Fascinated with the potential of digitization in life sciences and the broader healthcare ecosystem, Adam has invested in companies that span the realms of virtual clinical trials and real world evidence platforms to single particle tracking microscopy drug discovery companies.

Prior to his career in venture, Adam was a Postdoctoral Fellow of Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College, researching regenerative stem cell medicine in association with brain disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Originally from Australia, Adam has dual undergraduate degrees in Business and Science and a PhD from the Australian Stem Cell Centre, where he was a Premier Scholar. He has been published in numerous peer-reviewed, scientific journals. Adam loves to travel the world with his better half Mez, and has been known to wake up at all hours of the night to tune into Aussie Rules football matches.

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Adam Goulburn, PhD

Founder & Managing Partner

Nan Li

Founder & Managing Partner

Nan has a mixed technology, investing and entrepreneurial background and has been an active early stage venture investor for over a decade. He is interested in the application of cutting edge technologies including computer vision, AI/ML, NLP, robotics, and automation systems.

Most recently, Nan was a Managing Director at Obvious Ventures where he lead the frontier tech practice and invested in numerous companies applying core technologies towards industrial problems. This includes Dexterity, a robotics-powered automation platform; Recursion Pharma (NASDAQ: RXRX), a deep learning approach to cellular phenotyping; SwiftScale Biologics (acq. by Resilience), a biologics manufacturing platform; Planet (NYSE: PL), operating the largest constellation of satellites for Earth imaging; Octave, a modern mental health solution; Iterative Scopes, applying computer vision towards GI disease; AI Fleet, a full-stack trucking company powered by data science; Dyno Therapeutics, a gene therapy delivery discovery engine; LabGenius, a protein drug discovery company; Anagenex, a drug discovery company leveraging DNA encoded libraries; Gandeeva Therapeutics, a cryo-EM microscopy platform; and Inato, a sites marketplace for distributed clinical trials.

Previously, Nan managed early stage tech investments for Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors where he invested in frontier technologies including cryptocurrencies, bioinformatics, virtual reality, industrial robotics, and space tech. Earlier in his career, Nan was an investor at Bain Capital Ventures, a management consultant at Bain & Company, and a PM at Microsoft.

Nan holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Michigan and taught a course for 5 years at Stanford on applied AI and venture capital alongside Zavain - course notes can be found here. Nan is a first-generation immigrant from China and grew up in Detroit. He enjoys music, photography, culture, puzzles, all Detroit sports, and general nerdom.

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Nan Li

Founder & Managing Partner

Zavain Dar

Founder & Managing Partner

Zavain invests at the intersection and union of cutting-edge biotech and software. Zavain was previously a General Partner at Lux Capital where he led investments in companies including Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), which uses automation and deep learning to develop novel therapeutics; Enveda Biosciences, which applies cutting edge machine learning to next generation metabolomics to probe our planet’s dark chemical space for new medicines, Runway, which is putting machine learning tools into the hands of creators; Hugging Face, an open-source company democratizing Natural Language Processing; Dyno Therapeutics, an AI-powered gene therapy company; Nomic, a proteomics company; Creyon Bio, which is using active learning and automation to design custom antisense oligonucleotides for ultra rare n-of-1 diseases; LabGenius, a protein drug discovery company; Anagenex, a drug discovery company leveraging DNA encoded libraries; Thrive Earlier Detection, an early cancer detection company that Exact Sciences agreed to acquire for $2.15 billion in 2020; The Stacks Foundation, which is making Bitcoin programmable; Primer, a machine intelligence startup; and Cryptonumerics, a data control company acquired by Snowflake Computing.

Previously Zavain was an investor at Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Prior to VC, Zavain was a founder and computer scientist. At Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter) he engineered machine learning and AI systems across a proprietary distributed computing framework to build web-scale ranking algorithms.

Zavain holds a BS in symbolic systems and an MS in computer science from Stanford where he was a researcher in Stanford’s AI Lab. He has been a Lecturer at Stanford having taught seminars in Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy, and Venture Capital. Most recent course notes can be found here. Zavain is a first-generation immigrant from Kashmir.

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Zavain Dar

Founder & Managing Partner

Michele Vlcek

Operations Manager

Michele works closely with the General Partners and is responsible for the firm’s internal system management and a variety of operational activities. Most recently Michele was an Executive Operations Manager at Snapdocs, a mortgage technology company that helps real estate participants work together through integration and automation. Notably during her tenure she supported the CEO & Founder, built the executive support function, planned large internal events, and co-founded Women @ Snapdocs to help develop careers and foster support among women employees.

Previously, Michele was at Obvious Ventures, supporting the Co-Founder and Managing Director. Michele holds a B.S. in Economics and a minor in Sociology from Arizona State University. Michele grew up in Northeast PA, enjoys traveling, learning about new cultures and perfecting her baking skills.

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Michele Vlcek

Operations Manager